The Thrones of Kronos (63 page)

“Tactical,” he snapped. “Update.”

As so-Erechnat tur-Jenniskh read out the list of ships
damaged and destroyed, the blows far heavier on the enemy than on his fleet,
Juvaszt watched the tactical screen, straining to see a pattern. “Run it back,
half-hour intervals by five seconds.”

The tide of battle flowed back, defeating entropy as ships
scattered to their component atoms were reassembled in the ship’s computers. He
watched the ebb and flow, the thrust and counterthrust. Again and again, in
between the reports flowing ceaselessly in from the widespread battle, and the
commands he issued in response, Kyvernat Juvaszt studied the tactical history;
back and forth, time’s arrow shuttling to and fro.

And then he saw it: a triple absence that vanished at the twentieth
hour of the battle.

Juvaszt slammed his fist down on the arm of his console,
earning furtive looks from several officers. “Communications. Signal to array,
these coordinates.”

The communications officer obeyed, and having sent the
commands, hesitated. “Sir, that will turn them inward.”

“Yes.” Juvaszt glared. Her gaze dropped to her console.

As he returned to the battle, Juvaszt imagined his commands
lancing out via hyperwave, relayed via EM to the far-flung ships of the VLDA,
those that remained after the ravages of the enemy’s dragon’s teeth; the slow
yawing of the booms and the only slightly faster resolution of the image
collated by the relay ships and hurled back.

Finally the image resolved from fractal blocks of noise into
black space, the edge of the accretion disk, the red confusion of the Suneater
itself, centered small and sharply focused. And three points of flaring,
actinic light. He didn’t need the confirmation stuttered from Siglnt. He knew
what he was looking at.

Lances, in full deceleration.

Finally Tat was sleeping a normal sleep.

Breathing out a long sigh of relief, Lar levered himself
carefully away from Tat’s body. She stirred, and Dem’s arms tightened round
her. Lar withdraw from the bed, making sure the warmth stayed under the covers.
He kept his eyes on Tat as he sat on the floor and pulled on his shoes.

What had she encountered in the virtual world? Her fevered
mutterings as her body threw off the brainsuck overdose had been worse than
anything he’d seen before. For two long days he had stayed with her, on
Morrighon’s orders, while she cycled through mental states either
terrifying—when she reacted as if electrified, gibbering no words ever spoken
before—or awful, when she hunched over, drooling and slack-mouthed, eyes unfocused
and open. Her sleep had been violent, but Lar had not wanted to ask for any
more drugs; instead, he did his best to force her to drink water, to flush the
last of the brainsuck from her system. At last she had dropped into a normal
sleep.

From her disconnected phrases Lar gathered that she and
Sedry and the Unity had partially succeeded in restraining Norio, but that
there was at least one more problem. He had one way to find out the effects of
the virtual battle: gossip in the rec room.

When he stood up, he saw his brother’s eyes open.

“She’s scared,” Lar said in the softest possible voice.
“Stay with her, Dem. Stay.”

Dem’s eyes closed, but Lar sensed that he’d understood—as
much as he could understand anything. Sometimes his mind was like that of a
small child, other times it seemed absent altogether, but all his family
feelings were there still.

Dem’s future was the only dim hope Lar permitted himself
these days. He had learned enough about his new crewmates—strange, to think he
was crew before he’d ever seen the ship!—to know that Vi’ya was to be trusted.
She said, if they won free and made it to Rifthaven, she’d see that Dem got the
best medtech available, which meant Kelly surgeons, and she knew he could be
cured. How she knew, how it would be paid for, he didn’t consider. He simply
held on to that thought during the long nightmare—waking and sleeping—of life
on the Suneater.

When he reached the rec chamber, he stepped carefully past
the unmoving Ogre on guard and found the usual mix of groups, carefully
segregated: Catennach Bori, in the best seats—Farniol caught his eye and gave a
faint nod—their sycophants nearby, then scattered about the rest of the room
the lower-caste service Bori like himself, a few Dol’jharian grays, and finally
the few whose minds had mostly failed under the strangeness of the station,
huddled near the walls.

In pity Lar looked away from the vacant stares of the
latter. They had to be able to function on some level, or they would have been
spaced by the Dol’jharians, who did not keep anyone who could not work. But to
sit alone like that, in a kind of endless loop of terror . . .

That’s what comes of
destroying our families,
Lar thought angrily. He joined the chow line.
Strange, how he had grown up steeped in Bori history and lore, but he’d never
experienced the slightest desire to visit his home planet. Now, after this
enforced sojourn with the Bori not lucky enough to have escaped the conquerors,
he kept having dreams of freeing their brethren still on Dol’jhar and returning
with them to the archipelagos of Bori.

The greasy, peppered-cabbage smell of the food brought Lar’s
attention back. He discovered that he was next in line. He punched up his share
of the eternal stew and bread unfondly called dung and crusties, which was apparently
a centuries-old pejorative. The viscid brown glop in his bowl was vivid
testimony of how much the Dol’jharians had warped Bori culture. Even Tat, who
had left Bori at the age of four, remembered the excellent seafood and fresh
fruits and vegetables of an astonishing variety, and all so cheap even the
poorest ate well.

“Larghior.”

He looked up. Romarnan smiled from two or three down the
line, and said, “Grab a table.”

The tech was slim and tall, for a Bori, and handsome. Did he
even know that Tat was interested in him?

Lar sighed to himself. Poor Tat had never yet ventured out
of the family for sex, but she’d made it clear to Lar that she was now ready,
and Romarnan would be her choice. Lar had done his part to let Romarnan
know—and the Dol’jharian-raised Bori had not responded at all. It was so
strange to be part of a people, to speak the same language, but to have
completely different customs.

As the tech joined him, Lar looked up. “No extra shift?” he
asked, fighting back the tiredness-driven speculations.

“No,” Romarnan said. “Because of that long ruction.” He
hesitated, then continued in a quiet voice, but not a whisper, which would
attract unwelcome attention from the Catennach. They hated any secrets but
their own. “Where’s Tat?”

“Sick. She helped chase the . . . thing . . .
out of the main areas. That’s what the ruction was.”

“Brainsuck?” Romarnan grimaced in sympathy.

Lar nodded. At one of the game tables, Marim’s laugh rang
out, and Hreem cursed loudly. Neither of them cared if they disturbed the
Catennach or not.

Romarnan shook his head. “Ugly Shiidra-spit, brainsuck. She
say where the haunt is now?”

“No.”

“I hope it didn’t get driven outward. We’ll have to deal
with it when we head outside to chase interfaces.”

“Interfaces,” Lar repeated, trying to keep his heart from
hammering.
Are the Panarchists really
coming?
He and Tat had not yet been able to permit themselves to believe
it. When he knew he could keep his voice casual, he said, “Seen any?”

“None,” Romarnan said. “I don’t think they’re coming. Not
that way.” He yawned fiercely over his half-eaten bowl of stew. Then his gaze
lifted from Lar and turned fearful.

The conversations around them ceased. Lar’s back muscles
tightened when he saw a pucker forming halfway up the wall at his left. Abruptly
it sucked open with a ripe smack, and something like an eyeless worm slithered
out partway, waving in the air as if sensing or seeking something.

At the game table, Marim saw the pucker. She gasped, reached
across the table, and crashed a fist on Hreem’s console.

“Hey, blungesuck!” he shouted, slapping her hand away and
reaching for the keys again. Then he turned his head, frowning.

“What the hell is that?” Romarnan hissed.

Judging from the expression on the big Rifter’s face as he
slowly stood up, it was indeed the—what had Tat called it? “I think it’s
Hreem’s sex toy, come looking for him,” he replied, forgetting Romarnan didn’t
know anything about it.

“What!” Romarnan looked nauseated and terrified. “You
telling me the Maw chatzes people, too?”

Near the pucker, people were backing away, but Hreem paid
them no heed as he slowly advanced toward the reddish, worm-like thing waving
from the hole in the wall. He crouched slightly, his hands curved as if coaxing
a kitten to come to him. With a slurping noise, the worm—shestek, Lar
remembered—slid a little further out of its hole. One of the Bori sycophants
shrieked and threw her bowl of dung at it, splattering the wall.

“Hey!” Hreem spun around, but her action had released the
terrified paralysis of the people in the room. The only weapons at hand were
the bowls, cups, and spoons, so a sudden storm of dishes and their brown,
half-congealed contents pelted Hreem and the wall behind him, transforming him
into a sort of animated slop sculpture.

The sight reminded Lar horribly of the vid from the capital
on Torigan, the soldiers melting into slime when a missile liberated the mycospores
collected by the mad dowager Archonei.

Marim shrieked with laughter.

Hreem bellowed in rage, clutched for a jac he didn’t have,
then cursed as he lunged at the shestek. His feet flew out from under him in
the slippery mess and he fell with a meaty, liquid-sounding splat, as, with a
disgusting belch, the hole violently ejected the shestek. It landed on the
floor and began flopping around like a hooked fish, splattering glop
everywhere.

A new figure appeared in the doorway—Lar stared when he
recognized Lucifur, Vi’ya’s big Faustian cliff cat, that had been missing for
two days.

o0o

Answering his father’s summons, Anaris found Eusabian
standing before the huge holovid in his quarters, staring at the flaring eye of
the black hole as it devoured its companion sun. A hissing, roaring crackle of
an EM feed filled the room: the sound of matter torn asunder by a gravitational
field so powerful it permitted no existence but its own.

A slight movement of the Avatar’s head served as
acknowledgment of his arrival, but Eusabian said nothing. Anaris ranged himself
at arm’s length from his father, gazing at the stellar fire that echoed the
fires of their distant homeland. Anaris remembered a similar encounter, long
ago, in a library on faraway Arthelion. Then, the silence had been that of two
minds moving in similar orbits, despite their disparate origins.

Here, despite their common heritage, it was that of two
minds sundered by a distance akin to that traversed by the matter swallowed by
the black hole, which never again would this universe see.

Anaris clenched his teeth, dismissing the poetic cast of his
thoughts. He wondered if Vi’ya was affecting him more deeply than he had
calculated, then the Avatar broke the silence.

“I contemplate irony, and find its taste strange.”

The comment was so unexpected, so bizarre, that Anaris held
himself motionless only with great effort. Had his father’s mind snapped during
the long wait?

So he merely echoed the word, his voice flat. “Irony.”

The Avatar turned, his profile a harlequin of blue-white ice
and rusted iron in the flaring light from the death throes of a star. “Irony.
Tell me you have not savored it. Perhaps you are alone too rarely?”

Vi’ya.
Anaris
stilled the spinning of his mind; perhaps, in truth, he was alone too seldom,
or too much with her. Anger sparked. He let the emotion buoy him, knowing he
walked at the edge of a chasm.

“My duties leave me scant time for contemplation,” he
replied. An oblique strike at his father’s boredom.

But the response was unexpected: a gleam of teeth in a
semblance of smile. “Indeed. And not all of them onerous. Thence the irony.”
Eusabian faced the holovid. “My ancestors expunged the Chorei with a stone
ripped from heaven.”

“My” ancestors, not
“ours,”
he thought as his father continued after an almost imperceptible
pause.

“Or so they thought. But regardless of the outcome of this
struggle, it is the Chorei who will be the victors.”

The statement resonated on so many levels that there was
nothing Anaris could say. But the implied threat among its manifold
implications made his back tingle. He had not noticed the Ogres when he
entered. They might be poised in the shadows, awaiting the word that would end
his life.

The comm whistled for attention. Eusabian was annoyed as the
holovid flickered to a close-up of Barrodagh’s face. Great viscid tears of
sweat oozed from his forehead, his face twisted by a rictus of such pain Anaris
was amazed he could even speak.

“Lord, your pardon, but Juvaszt reports detecting three
lances inbound. They will impact in less than an hour.”

o0o

Morrighon’s compad chimed. “A riot in the rec area,” said
Farniol. In the background he could hear screaming, breaking crockery,
and—laughter? “Hreem’s sex toy came out of the wall.”

“Who else is there?”

Farniol knew what he meant. “Lar. And Marim.”

“Observe only. I will bring a squad of Tarkans.” Morrighon
slammed his fist down on his compad, terminating the connection.
“Regeneration!” he yelled.

But even this most lurid of Catennach curses failed to
relieve his feelings. How convenient it would be to have the Tarkans slaughter
everyone in the rec room, ridding him of Hreem and his threat to the tempath,
as well as Marim, whom Morrighon suspected more strongly with every passing
hour of being a nark for Barrodagh! But Tat would never forgive him if her
cousin were killed, and he needed her too much.